Genocide represents one of the deadliest scourges of the human experience. Communication practices provide the key missing ingredient toward preventing and ending this intensely symbolic activity. The Rhetoric of Genocide: Death as a Text reveals how strategic communication silences make this tragedy probable, and how a greater social ethic for communication openness repels and ends this great evil. Careful analysis of practical historical figures, such as the great debater James Farmer Jr., along with empirical policy successes in places such as Liberia provide a communication-based template for ridding the world of genocide in the twenty-first century.

Ben Voth is professor of rhetoric and director of debate and speech programs at Southern Methodist University, USA. His latest book is An Invitation to Debate: Reasoning and Argument as a Framework for Civil Society. As a collegiate speech and debate director he has coached more than five world champions, more than thirty national champions, and more than fifty state champions in speech and debate competitions over the past thirty years. He is also the author of Rwanda Rising: Debate as an Empowering International Pedagogy and The Rhetoric of Genocide: Death as a Text, as well as co-author with Robert E. Denton of Social Fragmentation and the Decline of American Democracy: The End of the Social Contract.

Introduction
1. The Role of Rhetoric and Communication in Genocide
2. State Killings as Public Argument
3. Discursive Complexity as a Communication Based Moral and Ethical Framework
4. The Cell Phone versus the AK-47
5. The Genocidaire: The Perpetrator
6. Christianity as a Critical Methodology for Moral Action
7. Islam and the Rhetorical Construct of Islamophobia
8. Global Anti-Semitism: The Persistent Genocidal Trope
9. James Farmer: A Model for Human Freedom
10. Gendercide: Sex Selection Abortion
11. Giving War a Chance: Critical Theory and Genocide
12. Winning Wars against Genocide
13. Conclusion: A World without Genocide
Appendix: Student Essay: Shia Islam